


fragments

by starforged



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Denial of Feelings, F/M, Possible Spoilers, compliant with DOTO, emsider, vague mentions of death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-20
Updated: 2017-09-20
Packaged: 2018-12-31 20:14:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12140247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starforged/pseuds/starforged
Summary: And still, she dreamed of him, in fragments, in human visions.





	fragments

Sometimes, there were dreams. There was a difference between her own dreams and his, and it was a difference she caught early on. The touch of the Void was cold and still, and no matter how many times she had visited and been pulled and found herself there, it never got easier to handle. All of her dreams, before she reclaimed the throne, were Void dreams. They were Outsider dreams. 

Most of her dreams now were her own.

She still _dreamed_ of him. 

It was a strange feeling, mired in her own confliction over a boy-god who revealed himself more to her than she perhaps wanted him to. He made himself real to her, and Emily was still working out how she was going to understand that feeling. 

He had come only once after he didn’t need her anymore, when they said their goodbyes in a way only a deity and an empress could: full of repressed emotion and lingering questions that had too many answers. The Outsider didn’t interfere; that’s what he told her. Emily wasn’t sure if he knew how to comprehend how much he did, the little touches to point her where he needed her to go. She didn’t tell him, of course. 

This way was better. 

And still, she dreamed of him, in fragments, in human visions. She’d wake, disappointed, but it was the only time she would give herself to worry about him, alone in the Void, watching. Maybe it was obsession; she was an empress, and as much as she hated the fawning, she recognized its absence _._ The Outsider had gone away, as easily as he had come. She didn’t have such luck. 

Emily leaned back in her chair, rubbing her eyes as they burned. There was an unfortunate amount of letters and decrees and cries for help piled on her desk. An urge to light them up with a candle was almost too strong. She took to ruling with a renewed vigor months ago when she returned home again, but that didn’t make it any less boring. 

She buried her face in her hands and swallowed back a groan. This was not the hands-on approach she wanted to take as empress, but such an important task. Corvo had teased her earlier that day over the paperwork. 

She could feel the world shift before her hands dropped, like she had been spilled into the ocean and tossed beneath a wave. When she opened her eyes, he sat perched on her desk, his thigh against her arm, his body dripping with the Void. Half reality, half dream. Black eyes stared down at her, but that had long stopped being a concern to her. No, it was the way his face had contorted, like the flashes of anger she had seen from him back when Delilah had been a threat to him. It made her uneasy, the look, his too-close presence, but when she made to push her chair back from the desk, he grabbed her wrist and held on.

“What’s wrong?” Because she knew something was wrong, or he wouldn’t be here. They said goodbyes, she was already marked. 

The good little empress had served her purpose to the god of the Void. 

She couldn’t help the thread of worry in her voice, but she didn’t wish to follow where that thread originated from. 

“What do you think the end is like, Emily? Do you dream of it as a peaceful rest?” Cold fingers pressed tight to her pulse point, and she had no doubts that he could detect the spike in her heart rate, the way it thumped in her chest. 

Was this the end?

“I don’t dream of the end,” she said. But yes, she would want it to be peaceful. She wouldn’t want to be trapped like her mother’s spirit was, she wouldn’t want to be trapped like the Outsider was. 

His mouth twisted, almost cruelly. “You dream of me instead.”

It was an entirely involuntary reaction, the way heat skittered up her neck and across her face in a flush. What she dreamed wasn’t obscene, it didn’t require the embarrassment that she felt settle in her chest. Conversations, actions, her hands across his face, his fingers tracing the mark he left on her when she said yes. 

No, this feeling rose out of something else. That he watched and that he knew and that he felt her interesting enough to keep an eye on but not enough to come back to her. 

With her free hand, she grabbed his hand and pried his fingers off of her skin. Her brow furrowed, a twitch in the corner of her mouth. “I dream of plenty of things. Once, I dreamt that I was a bird who sang rainbows. So if you’re here out of interest of my dreams and what they mean, feel free to linger. Otherwise, I’m busy.”

Emily was well aware that she was rejecting a god. His fingers flexed towards her, his wrist still in her soft grip. 

“The little empress, rebuilding what she helped to let languish in the first place, what rotted out from underneath of her mother.” The anger hadn’t drained from his face completely yet, but his tone had been leached and grown soft. She leaned in to hear his words. “You are brighter than I anticipated.”

She didn’t know what to say. It would be more rational to think it was her ending he wanted to talk about, that he came back to tell her. But there wasn’t a rationality to what he was, what she could do, what they were. And she had to wonder, at this moment, if he came to visit her again because something was wrong with him, that he had let himself become too human again with Delilah’s taint, with _her_ existence as he bent his own rules for her. 

“How can I help?” Because that was what he wanted, wasn’t it? Why else would he be here, but to request her help again? And she would do it, and she wouldn’t question why because there were some answers that didn’t need to be understood.

“Do you think the end hurts?” he asked her instead.

She thought about it for a second. “Sometimes.”

He took her hand again, the one with his mark, and balled her fingers into a fist. She watched with curiosity as he pressed her fist against his chest, over a heart that she knew didn’t beat anymore. Not since that dagger had gone to his throat and kissed his skin.

Not since he became a god. 

“I’ve waited a long time for this, for an end I wasn’t sure could happen.” The Outsider stared down at her hand on his chest. 

A cold trickle of fear rolled down her spine. “You can’t be serious.” Her words come out in a snap, furious and demanding. 

He lifted his face to hers again where she hovered a bit over him. “All things end, Emily Kaldwin. You, of all people, should know this lesson well.”

“Why me? Why come to me and lay out your _fears_ as if I could do anything to soothe them? I can’t tell a god who doesn’t understand emotion how to feel about vague endings and potential death,” she said through gritted teeth. 

One hand was pressed to his chest, but the other moved to tangle in his collar, pulling him up straight. She stood between his legs and knobby knees, far too close than anyone has gotten to him in 4000 years. She knew that. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she did. Her knuckles brushed over his throat, just barely scraping his skin. 

He let her. He watched her with that same face he always did, feigning distance, eyes a void, but the truth was unavoidable.

If he wasn’t here to request her help, and if it was already determined that she was interesting enough to receive his mark, then he was here for her. 

“Delilah ruined whatever pretense you had wrapped yourself in,” Emily told him in a whisper. “You showed me that you were human, and now I’m what you’ve found yourself attached to. But only _now._ Only at the end, apparently.”

The truth was unavoidable. 

She wanted to be necessary when things weren’t dire. 

For the first time, he remained silent. No goading responses, no loaded questions, no observations. He merely watched her as she broke through a wall she had built around herself for years. He let her hands rest on his body, half reality, half dream. And he watched. 

She told herself that leaning forward, that pressing her forehead to his, that closing her eyes, was so that she couldn’t tell he watched anymore. She told herself it wasn’t because she felt sympathy for a boy who had never asked for this, or because she felt an ache in her chest that an end was coming. 

They held each other up that way.

* * *

There was a dream. It was her own this time. He held her hand, and it was warm. 

She woke up with the same disappointment that always enveloped her, but this time an emptiness ate it.

She looked at the hand that he had held in her dream. 

Nothing marked her now.


End file.
